RelentlesslyOptimistic

Because their lips are moving: Fox News on Iraq

In an "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" kind of way, this was lifted entirely from Sisyphus Shrugged, in part because of the terrific title:

Oceana has or has not always been at war with itself

Sisyphus notes that these are presented in the order in which Fox broadcast them.

TV News: Then and now

I subscribe to a feed for Calvin and Hobbes which provides the strip from ten years ago that day. Here's today's:

©Bill Watterson by Universal Press Syndicate

Fair and disgraceful

Faux News - Fair and something....via Kantor.com

What if Fox News were around during other historical events?

A summary of this Faux News Fark thread is here. Via Daily Kos.

Bill Watterston: Prophet

One of the things that sold me on using an aggregator to get my main news was that I could subscribe to daily comics, even Calvin and Hobbes, with each strip run 11 years to the day after it first appeared. In this one, Calvin's description of what drives modern media is even more true and relevant than it was then.

Photo ID's will restore confidence in the electoral process

A blue ribbon commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker came to the stupid-ass conclusion that people will have more confidence in the electoral system if we simply require photo ID's.

Votes are being sold and stolen by party professionals, voting machines can be hacked by teenagers too young to vote, and photo ID's are going to restore confidence?

Without even getting into the discriminatory issues around requiring photo ID's, the kindest thing you can say is that's just dumb.

KC Star | Big names help boost idea of photo IDs for voting.

Little improvement in substance, but the spin effort is doing well!

NY Times: "White House Enacts a Plan to Ease Political Damage...the White House rolled out a plan this weekend to contain the political damage from the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina...The effort is being directed by Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, and his communications director, Dan Bartlett."

Talking Points Memo: "the Washington Post got burned today by a "senior Bush official" who told them that Gov. Blanco of Louisiana had never declared a state of emergency in the site -- a claim the Post printed as fact. Yet the claim was demonstrably false and by late afternoon the Post had been compelled to print a correction.
This week's Newsweek contains the same false claim -- and though their recital of the anecdote is unsourced, common sense suggests that someone or some operation fed them both the same line, which neither organization checked out before running.

The Stakeholder: On Friday, September 3rd, Louisiana GOP Congressman Charles Boustany said he spent the past 48 hours urging the Bush administration to send help. "I started making calls and trying to impress upon the White House and others that something needed to be done," he said. "The state resources were being overwhelmed, and we needed direct federal assistance, command and control, and security -- all three of which are lacking."
On Monday, September 6th, Boustany said: "Most of the red tape and problems have been at the state level. I have to say that the federal response has been focused on New Orleans with search and rescue operations which is going very, very well at this stage. But we've had a completely ineffectual state response and this is being borne by the local communities to help now. and I have asked the president to take this into consideration, consider that the state response is completely ineffectual and the full range of social and health care needs needs to be met."

There was a breach in message discipline, though:

Washington Monthly: Lt. Commander Sean Kelly, Pentagon Spokesman for Northern Command, said: "Northcom started planning before the storm even hit....We had the USS Bataan sailing almost behind the hurricane so once the hurricane made landfall, its search and rescue helicopters could be available almost immediately So, we had things ready.
The only caveat is: we have to wait until the president authorizes us to do so. The laws of the United States say that the military can't just act in this fashion; we have to wait for the president to give us permission."

Meanwhile in Louisiana and Mississippi (part of a much longer list at DailyKos):

• FEMA won't accept Amtrak's help in evacuations
• FEMA turns away experienced firefighters
• FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks
• FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel
• FEMA won't let Red Cross deliver food
• FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans
• FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid
• FEMA turns away generators
• FEMA: "First Responders Urged Not To Respond"

Image from Google Maps

Republican front group gets media, conservative blogs to bite

BlogsNow lists the "most linked to in 7,682,537 weblogs." At number 21 and climbing as of 1:00 PM (Central) is a story (broken link) that was apparently in the Arizona Republic for some time today before being pulled.

Steve at No More Mr. Nice Blog apparently actually saw the article, which he references in a post at 8:17 this morning. As far as Google News knows, the Arizona Republic is the only red-faced (sorry, couldn't help it) major media outlet to have run the story.

BradBlog broke the news about false-front "American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR)" in March after it was the only "voting rights" organization invited to testify before Congress' House Administrative Committe, chaired by Ohio Republican Congressman Bob Ney. ACVR had registered their web site only four days before, and the only names listed in the domain registration or testifying in the hearing were top Bush Campaign and RNC officials.

Jim Dyke of Dyke Associates was listed in the domain registration for ACVR and was the 2004 Communications Director for the Republican National Committee. Dyke lied to Brad of BradBlog in an interview, claiming that the address in the registration was that of "the company that designed the website." The address turned out to be that of a mailbox at a UPS store. Dyke is listed as both the administrative and technical contact for the domain. In an interesting twist, the registration record was blocked from public view for BradBlog's post of March 24, but appeared in this SamSpade.org search today. A search at Network Solutions yeilds only the blocked information.

The person who testified for ACVR was St. Louis attorney, Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, II, an attorney with Lathrop and Gage. According to BradBlog, "Hearne is a former Reagan Administration official, is the National Election Counsel to Bush-Cheney ’04 Inc. and was Missouri counsel to Bush-Cheney ‘00 Inc. As well, he was General Counsel to Republican Missouri Governor Blunt." The address on ACVR's web site is the same as Lathrop and Gage's Washington D.C. office.

Update: BradBlog is already on the story, which was picked up by a number of uncritical right-wing propaganda blogs, and at least one TV News Station. There's a listing of all things ACVR at BradBlog here.

"We regret your mistake"

Tom Toles on the Downing Street Memo

Breathtaking

The Right Conversation for America. by Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post

The United States and this administration in particular continually assert the moral right to behave differently than other nations. We will not be bound by the International Criminal Court. We insist that other nations give up their nuclear weapons while we keep our own. We wage war without U.N. Security Council approval. We publish annual report cards on everyone else's human rights records.

The premise of this highhandedness is that the United States is, on balance, a force for good in the world -- a superpower that uses its might not to subjugate others but to allow them to live freely. This is a premise that The Post's editorial page on the whole accepts -- to the dismay of many readers.

The Post agrees, then, that might makes right, and that being a force for good excuses bad bahavior. The terrorists also believe that they are a force for good in the world, that they are fighting evil, and so justified in their extreme measures.

We have been a force for good in the world. But it's hard to say that we are one right now. The means determines the end. The means we use -- torture, indiscriminate killing of civilians -- are some of the same ones used by the terrorists. How can we acheive good by practicing evil?

Via Busy, Busy, Busy

NewsTrust: Independent News Ratings

The old days when you could trust the media to be somewhat objective are about as mythical as many other visions of those better days in the past. Still, the extreme and hidden biases of many media outlets today does seem worse than even a decade ago.

NewsTrust is an ambitious effort to create a volunteer-based rating service that will use defined metrics to score stories on fairness, accuracy and credibility.

The service hasn't launched yet, but so far it appears they're doing everything right. They have an impressive staff and group of advisers, and in three months have done surveys that cross the political spectrum, tested the concept and usability of their service and developed and tested their news review tool.

"In today's rapidly changing media landscape, it is becoming harder to tell truth from fiction. Increasingly, sloppy journalism is treated as legitimate news, opinions are presented as facts, and misinformation spreads throughout our news media, threatening the foundation of democracy.

A non-profit venture...is now working on a practical solution to those issues...NewsTrust...aims to bring together experienced journalists and volunteer reviewers to rate news stories and their sources according to rigorous editorial standards"

Via Good Morning Silicon Valley

Scientific American: Now Fair and Balanced, and less filling!

I got busy and missed this until Torrez pointed it out. In their April 1 issue the editors of Scientific American come clean and admit how biased they've been towards facts and peer-reviewed theories, and even science. That's going to change, though.  In Okay, We Give Up -- We feel so ashamed the editors admit to their errors, and promise to change:

"True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.[...]
Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.[...]
Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But [Intelligent Design] theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.[...]
Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. [...]
Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Image from here

The Agonist to the National Press Club: Hello?

The supposed "liberal" media has covered several events centered around blogging. All have had little or no representation from liberal or progressive blogs, and overwhelming representation from conservative ones.

Sean-Paul Kelley of The Agonist. is asking the National Press Club to include a serious liberal blogger in an upcoming forum. The "discredited conservative media operative Jeff Gannon, neé Guckert," who wasn't a blogger until after he was unmasked, was invited to be a panelist. "Guckert's token liberal counterpart will be a gossip blogger and sex comedy blogger."

As Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise said:

You can't make this stuff up: The National Press Club's panel on blogs and journalism includes Gannon/Guckert and Wonkette, but no liberal bloggers.

The Gannon/Guckert story was investigated and written first and most in blogs, primarily by John Aravosis of Americablog.org, yet the National Press Club, that bastion of the "liberal" media, did not think to invite him to be on the panel. Sean-Paul's full letter asking them to include Aravosis is here, along with contact info to weigh in with the Press Club.

Sleepwalking to disaster in Iran

Scott Ritter former UN Chief Weapons inspector in Iraq, wrote this essay about the clear US intention to attack Iran later this year. Many of the quotes of neoconservatives could have been about Iraq before the war: unsubstantiated allegations of intelligence and denying the knowledge of inspectors as justification for doing what they want to do anyway.
Sleepwalking to disaster in Iran.

"Late last year, in the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, I was contacted by someone close to the Bush administration about the situation in Iraq."[...]
"The American media today is sleepwalking towards an American war with Iran with all of the incompetence and lack of integrity that it displayed during a similar path trodden during the buildup to our current war with Iraq."[...]
"Enter John Bolton, who, as the former US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security for the Bush administration, is responsible for drafting the current US
policy towards Iran.
In February 2004, Bolton threw down the gauntlet by stating that Iran had a 'secret nuclear weapons programme' that was
unknown to the IAEA. 'There is no doubt that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons production programme', Bolton said, without providing any source to back up his assertions."

Sounds too familiar, doesn't it?

Onward Christian Soldier

Another day, another astounding post from Billmon that has to be repeated in its entirety. Welcome back, Bill!

Whiskey Bar: Christian Soldier

The legal battle over the life of Terri Schiavo may have ended, but a thick, fervent crowd remains in the makeshift encampment outside the Woodside Hospice House here . . .

No, we're not going to go home," said Bill Tierney, a young daughter at his side. "Terri is not dead until she's dead" . . .

Mr. Tierney, a former military intelligence officer in Iraq who works as a translator and investigator for private companies, cried as he talked about watching the Schiavo spectacle on television and feeling the utter need to be at the hospice.

New York Times
Protesters With Hearts on Sleeves and Anger on Signs
March 28, 2005

 

Bill Tierney . . . had just returned from eight months working as an interrogator for US forces in Baghdad, and had come to talk, on the record, about torture.

''The Brits came up with an expression – wog,'' Tierney said. ''That stands for Wily Oriental Gentleman. There's a lot of wiliness in that part of the world.''. . .

After explaining his various psychological tactics to the audience, interrogator Bill Tierney (a private contractor working with the Army) said, ''I tried to be nuanced and culturally aware. But the suspects didn't break.''

Suddenly Tierney's temper rose. ''They did not break!'' he shouted. ''I'm here to win. I'm here so our civilization beats theirs! Now what are you willing to do to win?'' he asked, pointing to a woman in the front row. ''You are the interrogators, you are the ones who have to get the information from the Iraqis. What do you do? That word 'torture'. You immediately think, 'That's not me.' But are we litigating this war or fighting it?'' . . .

Asked about Abu Ghraib, Tierney said that for an interrogator, ''sadism is always right over the hill. You have to admit it. Don't fool yourself – there is a part of you that will say, 'This is fun.' ''

Boston Globe
Spy world
February 13, 2005